Review: Anthony Domestico on Rachel Cusk

Virginia Woolf once observed that literary convention resembles social convention. A hostess doesn’t comment on the weather because she wants to discuss meteorological conditions: “She begins by saying that we are having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest.” In a similar way, literary convention establishes a “common meeting-place” that is “reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.” Characters will be internally coherent; plots will unfold dramatically and end conclusively: these are the expectations with which we approach fiction and through which, as Woolf puts it, the “difficult business of intimacy” between writer and reader can begin.

Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade, doesn’t court intimacy but refuses it. The book opens with an act of defamiliarization: “At a certain point in his career the artist G, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down.” We might say that, at a certain point in her career—more specifically, with the publication of Outline in 2014—Cusk began to write … well, not upside down but certainly from an estranged perspective. Her first seven novels were exemplary works of lyrical realism: elegant, sharp, and rather traditional. Over the last ten years, though, she has been engaged in an act of literary demolition, with Parade the brilliant, chilly, and unsettling endpoint of her project.

For Cusk, the task of the artist isn’t entertainment but truth. (The word appears over two dozen times in Parade.) And so she has set out to excise from her fiction all that she sees as distracting from truth: neatly shaped plots; clearly differentiated characters; stylistic virtuosity. Scrupulousness is her aesthetic and ethical ideal, writing a practice through which the self is disciplined and controlled. Cusk has described “point of view” as not just a “narrative technique” but how we “put the subjective self to the test of objectivity.” Writing is an effort to “exteriorize sensibility,” give it the hardness of fact.

In her Outline trilogy, characters seek to escape from the plots that mould their lives, especially those having to do with motherhood and marriage. In Parade, artists worry over the relationship between their work and reality. (That word appears over three dozen times.) “Reality would always be better than the attempt to represent it,” one character thinks. “To see without being seen,” another notes, “there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation.” Parade is the strangest book Cusk has written because, in its pursuit of questions about artistic creation—is it an act of self-effacement or self-aggrandizement? an expression of freedom or of cruelty or both?—it jettisons character almost altogether.

Some of Parade’s peculiarities can be seen in its first sentence. The character G is identified by a letter rather than a name; he seems less a person than a mathematical variable or musical note. Other peculiarities emerge more gradually. After about five pages, Cusk begins cutting between G’s artistic reinvention (as well as his misogyny) and the apparently unrelated narrative—sometimes presented in first-person plural, sometimes in first-person singular—of an unnamed female writer who has been hit in the head by a stranger on the streets of Paris. “The boundary of possibility had been moved,” the women observes of the effects of her assault, “and the world was now a different place.” Describing G’s new approach to his work, Cusk writes, “When G’s wife first saw the upside-down paintings she felt as though she had been hit.” Violence brings about a change in the woman’s perspective; a change in artistic perspective is experienced as an act of perceptual violence.

The book’s most interesting peculiarities, though, occur at the level of character. Midway through the first of the book’s four major sections, G’s identity suddenly shifts. In one sentence, he’s the celebrated and nasty painter who has just discovered the power of “inversion.” Then, without explanation, the unnamed writer mentions that, after suffering her assault, she “went away for a weekend to another city, to see an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G.” Some pages later, G’s identity changes once more: now, he’s a Black painter who “came to believe that art was useless as a tool of political change.” Over the course of Parade, G is also a writer/director resembling Éric Rohmer and a female painter admired for the “discipline of [her] candor.” To repurpose D. H. Lawrence, with whom Cusk has had an ambivalent relationship, “You mustn’t look in [Parade] for the old stable ego of the character.” This is character as collage or abstraction, continuity replaced by juxtaposition and combination.

In the essay where she talks about convention, Virginia Woolf declares that the novel developed with one end in mind: “to express character.” In Cusk’s earlier work, she delighted in expressing character. Now she sees character as another convention to be discarded. Late in Parade, she describes “the pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity”; such perception “reveals the pathos of identity.” One admires the rigor with which Cusk pursues this vision even while acknowledging that, without interaction or subjectivity, there can’t be much humor (Cusk can be very funny; she isn’t in Parade) or even readerly pleasure. There’s an asceticism to Cusk—she was raised Catholic and has described this upbringing as “like a bruise or mark on the skin”—that sometimes equates suffering with seriousness.

In Arlington Park, a character reflects upon the kitchen redesign that has consumed her and her husband: “They had knocked through until they had created not space but emptiness. They had gone too far: nobody had told them to stop.” With Parade, Cusk’s negative project seems to have come to its conclusion. What, if anything, will be built in the emptiness she has cleared remains to be seen.

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Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. Find his other reviews for Book Post here!

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